Goodbye, Obama

The outgoing president leaves a loaded gun in the Oval Office.

- Gene Healy

In the presidency’s long march toward full-spectrum dominance over American life, the POTUS has become, among other things, host in chief of our national talk show. Barack Obama fulfilled that role better than most. Our 44th president never seemed more completely in his element than when trading zingers at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. We find it reassuring somehow to be reminded that the guy with the kill list has a sense of humor.

AT THE 2015 version of the annual press and pols confab, Obama got one of his bigger laugh lines when he joked: “Dick Cheney says he thinks I’m the worst president of his lifetime. Which is interesting because I think Dick Cheney is the worst president of my lifetime.” But the jibe had a funny-because-it’s-true element that Obama didn’t intend. As George W. Bush’s “co-president,” Cheney repeatedly described the team’s mission as “leaving the presidency stronger than we found it.” In that respect, Cheney and Obama have more in common than either would care to acknowledge.

As a young man, biographer David Maraniss reports, Obama developed “an intense sense of mission...sometimes bordering [on] messianic.” By the time the Oval Office was in his sights, he’d decided “his mission was to leave a legacy as a president of consequence.”